MARTINEZ — A Danville lawyer who launched a failed bid for Contra Costa County district attorney in 2010 is awaiting trial on felony charges, after police say she and a co-defendant swindled a brilliant millionaire inventor — who was suffering from dementia — out of more than $100,000, taking him to banks and withdrawing thousands in cash at a time.

Co-defendants Elham “Elle” Falahat, 52, the former DA candidate, and Hamid Ben Maghsoudi, 73, have both pleaded not guilty to two charges of felony grand theft. In July, a judge reviewed evidence and ordered both defendants to stand trial, but a trial date has not been set.

Falahat is the second candidate from the 2010 district attorney’s race to be charged with a felony. Eventual winner Mark Peterson recently resigned from the office after being charged with grand theft and 12 counts of perjury for illegally spending $66,000 in campaign cash on personal expenses.

The bizarre case against Falahat and Maghsoudi centers on a now-deceased alleged victim, Andrew Gabor, who made a fortune after his daisy wheel printer system invention was picked up by Xerox in the 1970s, according to a 1989 Desert News article.

Falahat and Maghsoudi’s attorneys have argued that Gabor simply hired the defendants, as a lawyer and caretaker, respectively, and paid them for their work. But prosecutors say Gabor had clearly started showing signs of dementia toward the end of his life, when he came into contact with both defendants.

The two should have known Gabor was suffering from a cognitive disorder, prosecutors argue, because he was acting out of character — for instance, buying a $400,000 Bentley when he wasn’t known to be a flashy person. He also exhibited odd behavior, like cutting 100 flashlights in half and using them to light his house, or developing an obsession with an invention that he believed would help overweight people have sex. Doctors who interviewed him determined he had a cognitive disorder and memory problems, and he’d been placed on a mental health hold, according to prosecution witnesses.

Police started investigating the case in June 2014 after Falahat and Maghsoudi showed up at a bank in Walnut Creek with Gabor and attempted to arrange a weekly $10,000 transfer into their accounts. A clerk, noting several similar transfers, determined the account activity was suspicious and called police.

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Investigators determined Gabor had already paid around $72,000 to Maghsoudi and around $47,000 to Falahat. They found other witnesses who said they’d refused to take money from Gabor because he didn’t seem mentally competent, according to court records.

Walnut Creek police took the case straight to the state attorney general rather than the Contra Costa DA. The case was filed in April 2016, nearly two years after the allegations surfaced.

“We saw some conflicts of interest with the DA’s office, and I can’t get into what those were,” Walnut Creek police Cpt. Steve Gorski said. He later said there were “pre-existing relationships” and referenced Falahat’s run for district attorney but declined to comment on whether Falahat had contacted anyone in the DA’s office when she learned she was under criminal investigation.

In a written statement to this newspaper, Falahat called the charge “malicious” and politically driven.

“I am innocent and remain proud of the work I did for my client (Gabor),” Falahat said.

Maghsoudi’s attorney, a public defender, declined to comment. Both defendants are out of custody.

Falahat’s attorney, Michael Cardoza, suggested that prosecutors should have gone after the company that sold Gabor the Bentley if they were going to charge his client, and argued in the preliminary hearing that Gabor’s eccentric behavior could be attributed to him simply wanting to enjoy life — and his fortune — in his final years. He said the so-called “sex chair” was a legitimate invention that could have been a commercial success if Gabor had lived to complete it, and that Gabor was intelligent enough to hide his disorder from others.

“Go out big time, Mr. Gabor. You get to buy a $450,000 Bentley and enjoy the heck out of it,” Cardoza said, according to a court transcript. “You want to pay Falahat to get a story written about you and a chair some might think is crazy, go ahead and do it. You got the dough.”

Falahat is the latest past candidate for DA to be charged with a felony. Prosecutor Michael Gressett, who ran for the office several times, was charged with raping a colleague in 2008, but the case was dropped after prosecutors failed to tell grand jurors that the alleged victim had received a settlement from the county.

Cardoza — who also represented Gressett — compared his case to Falahat’s, claiming both were politically motivated. He said prosecutors were “jousting at windmills.”

“I’m thinking, boy, you run for DA in this county, you better watch out,” Cardoza said. Ironically, Cardoza confirmed later in the interview that he is considering launching a 2018 run for DA.

Falahat, a private attorney who worked briefly as a prosecutor in Southern California, ran for DA in 2010 as an outsider, against attorney Dan O’Malley and Peterson. She finished third behind Peterson and O’Malley with 15.7 percent of the vote in the primary, then endorsed Peterson in a runoff election. Peterson’s tenure ended in June, when he pleaded no contest to perjury.

In an interview last week, Falahat said she ran for DA in part because “the Michael Gressett malicious prosecution angered me to the point of taking a stand to clean up all the corruption in that office.”

O’Malley, now the lone 2010 DA candidate who has never been charged with a felony, said he had no knowledge of the facts of the case but that Falahat had always appeared “slippery” to him.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” O’Malley said, when told of the charges. “It’s so sad that those were my opponents six or seven years ago. It’s a sad state of affairs, and I’m hopeful Contra Costa County will get back to a respectable place.”

Asked to respond to O’Malley’s comments, Falahat said, “I feel sorry that Mr. O’Malley is evidently still continuing to hold me responsible for costing him the election and so motivated to make false and untrue statements in retaliation against me.”